The funny thing here is that bastion was buffed against things that tickle you since the health on block is more valuable if monster hits you for 50 dmg than the DR was but against higher hits the DR was better.
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I don’t understand why people keep complaining about the RV “nerf”.
The 0.8.5b version looks like a nerf to me, the 0.8.5 version not really.
Also, what part of its “identity” did it loose in 0.8.5?
A real DaFuq nerf to me is what they did to Flurry.
I mean having only around like 30% of your damage left after the patch is insane.
Edit: Seems like having only around 10% of your damage left after the patch is more accurate lol
There were two bugs, first, the Force Wave wasn’t inheriting Flurry’s 40% less chance to apply ailments as it should have (so if you had 900% chance to poison, it would apply 9 stacks per hit when it should have been 5.4 stacks per hit) & secondly Flurry as a whole as having any attack speed modifiers applied twice instead of once.
Whether poison channelled Flurry is or is not “competitive” now that it’s actually working is the question that should be asked & comparing the poison stack/damage ceiling compared to other poison skills to see whether it’s still massively overperforming or whether it’s comparable to the others.
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I do understand what they fixed but I can’t really understand why they fixed it in that way.
They pretty much gutted every (channeled) Flurry build when their target was clearly melee poison Flurry.
To me part of the whole Flurry + Poison identity was the ridiculously fast attack speed to apply Poison which has a rather low base damage. It made the skill “feel” good (at least to me) so I don’t know why they “fixed” that. The Force Wave fix would have been enough imho. Flurry with a Bow feels even worse now. To me all my Flurry characters are dead now. I’m not mad about this (none of them was my strongest character) but kinda sad because they “felt” good playing and I really enjoyed it. Like some dude in the forum once said “Poison flurry is one hell of a drug.” At least it used to be, now it’s like cough syrup…
Because they weren’t working properly. What they should then ideally do, as I suggested in my previous post, was to review how non-melee channelled flurry sits compared to the other options & if it needs some buffs then they can work out what to do to buff them without getting back to melee poison channelled flurry being able to do ~120m per tick (with top notch gear). That’s why they reduced the mana cost for the Multishot proc, now they “just” need to have a look at the other builds & improve them where necessary so they’re not collateral damage from the melee flurry fix.
That’s fair enough & good feedback & the more details as to how & why you feel that way the better.
They have in the past “fixed” bugs then added “proper” ways of getting what the bug did (though to be fair, only the freeze beetle being spawned in pairs actually comes to mind).
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Not sure if you are exaggerating, but my Poison Flurry only did around 6,5m-7m on the dummy (no buffs like acid flask or anything) and my gear was pretty decent.
But if you are serious and someone was able to do ~120m with their gear then they kind of deserved it in some way… can’t imagine the pain of farming such perfectly rolled equipment. 
It’s hard to explain. I don’t know if you played a Bow Flurry character (I’ve had 3 of them: Phys, Poison, Bowmage), it’s sometimes hard to explain how something feels gameplay wise.
If you play retro games you know what I mean when talking about how the controls in those games some “feel”.
It just feels sluggish and wrong… like there is barely a difference between channeled and non channeled.
But I don’t want to be a slug. I want to be a machine gun. 
Yup, they posted pics on discord in the Rogue channel…
I’m currently playing a lich with aura of decay (first playthrough) and was feeling pretty good about the high-risk, high reward of my aura of decay build (“high” poison, but also poison you, so I’ve died to my own spell a few times).
But damn, 120m per tick (or even 2-3m) without the downside of killing yourself if you’re too greedy is very disgusting.
But back on the topic of “nerfing” vs “buffing”, I think you need a bit of both. If you’re constantly buffing, you end up with power creep. Because there are so many variables, synergies and builds, it’s impossible to have everything being equal.
if you constantly bring the back of the pack at the top, you’ll always be pushing the ceiling.
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For the record, rip blood is a grossly powerful skill if you use it the right way. I think it badly needs to be remodeled (blood splatter area not mingling with rip blood for example, and the minion area off if lala land), but it’s NOT weak.
Having skills go up to 25 is just going to power creep; sounds great, but won’t ‘do’ anything concrete to change the game.
Not quite sure what you mean by that?
This is something I’ve also notice : rip blood seems to be better at generating ward versus soul feast. Which is crazy, because one cost close to 0 MP while the other requires the targets to be cursed and cost 20 MP
I’m not saying I don’t believe you or they used edited characters to achieve those numbers, but I’m always doubtful about some random person on the internet showing me an image. You know… because of the pixels and stuff…
Of course it could be legit, but I feel like ~120m might be a little inflated when someone who claims to have BiS daggers says their damage went down from ~12m to ~300k. Then again those numbers also seem exaggerated, but on the other end of the spectrum, so who knows. 
All I know and care about is that the character I had the most fun with in the two or three weeks prior to the patch now feels like shit, at least in my opinion, as the whole charm of the character is gone. But of course that’s totally subjective.
I want to say @Arborus had a similar character as well. So not just a rando on the internet with an edited character.
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Because the developers have an idea as to how quickly you should progress, and if the players find something that enables them to reliably progress faster you catch the nerf.
Also something about modern game design placing such a high priority on player engagement as the gold standard to judge games by.
Right? Wrong? It is what it is.
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I mean it exactly as I have written it I suppose. I don’t have my game up but blood splatter states something like “does not work with rip blood in other parts of the tree”. Thus, to use blood splatter with any effect, you can only use the handful of nodes on the tree at the bottom of the page, which used to be fine when you could go 7/7 in I think it was damage, but now you max out too fast so you have to put points into either poison or minions, which might make no sense based on build (such as mine).
The real issue is that instead of a minor nerf - they nerf certain things INTO THE GROUND.
Smite Hammerdin for instance used to get idols that gave mana on smite smite and they worked on smite procs. Now the idol is useless as it only works on direct smite and the playstyle is nowhere near as powerful as it used to be.
It was never supposed to work with proc’d smites, that’s not a nerf, that’s a bug fix & it was necessary given how easy it is now to get Smites (on Warpath, on an entire pack with Lunge, with Javelin, etc). It trivialised mana which is something the devs have always been against.
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The description never mentioned it back when it did that, it just said it refunded mana from smite - it wasn’t a bug, it was a exploit. It also enabled a ton of builds.
I get that “oh but we want people to care about mana” but the fact is that most of the good builds do not use mana or have a way to regenerate it fast.
You can safely assume that EHG has a pretty specific idea of how they want the game to be played, how much damage they want players doing, and how strong they want skills relative to each other. Every balance decision they make, whether it comes to items or skills, is probably done to keep as many things as possible within that realm of how they want the game to be played.
Sometimes that means nerfing overpowered things because those overpowered things don’t fit within that realm. That said, I think developers should be a little more relaxed about buffing under-used and under-powered mechanics.
If you’re playing an ARPG, expect nerfs to strong builds. It’s not a new concept, yet everyone acts shocked every. single. time.
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I think a lot of people are more concerned about builds being made “unplayable” and not necessarily a simple drop of numeric values of the damage.
There are a few examples where builds got “nerfed” because the interactions did not work as intended. Those nerfs are usually justified but sometimes it makes you think if in those cases numeric changes would actually solve the issue instead of getting rid of the interaction all together. For example the Necrobomber build.
In other cases the removal of certain interactions won’t break the build but makes it very hard to play the build smoothly if you don’t have top tier equipment. For example some people complained about the mana gain on smite change because now they actually would have to think about mana management on their Hammerdins. Unlike the Necrobomber this build is still playable, like the core mechanic didn’t change, it’s just not as easy to sustain mana as it was before.
Then there are cases where a nerf affects more than the targeted build (or few builds) like the channeling Flurry nerf. I think we all agree that the change was targeted towards the melee poison Flurry builds because their damage was “too high”. The problem is that every build that uses channeled Flurry was affected and a lot of builds couldn’t sustain mana after the nerf and just felt pretty shitty to play.
So yes, strong builds will most likely get nerfed (or rather builds that are “too strong”).
But the reasons for the nerf as well as how the nerf is realized should be the most important thing.
Does one specific build that uses skill X deal too much damage?
Does it use a certain interaction that puts its numbers above other builds that use skill X?
If yes, then nerf that specific build/interaction and not EVERY build that uses skill X!
Do 90% of the people that play class Y use a specific build?
If yes then maybe don’t force build diversity by nerfing that build to the grave but instead try to encourage build diversity by buffing the other builds!
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